DEMOCRACY -- FOR THE RICH

Columnist George Will worked himself into high dudgeon on this page
last week over the fact that Common Cause and other political
reformers don't share his peculiarly elitist vision of democracy. He's
right. We don't. For good reasons.

In Will's world, democracy is a great system -- for those who can
afford to buy it. He celebrates the growth of ``soft money'' -- those
huge unregulated contributions from corporations, labor unions and
wealthy individuals that lay at the heart of the scandals during the
last presidential campaign.

Will has a strange way of discussing soft money. He notes that the
almost $200 million of it raised by the two political parties in the
last election works out to a piddling 50 cents per voter. What could
be more innocent than that?

Not much -- if every voter had really given 50 cents of it. Instead,
more than $2.4 million of it came from Philip Morris alone, and
another $1 million from RJ Reynolds. In fact, 12 tobacco companies
together donated some $5.4 million in soft money during the 1998
election cycle. That's not 50 cents per voter. That's an average of
$450,000 per tobacco company.

Those contributions just might have had something to do with the
tobacco industry's success in killing the tobacco bill that would have
regulated the sale of cigarettes.

But for Will, it seems that's what democracy is all about. Every
citizen should have the same right as every tobacco company to buy a
million dollars' worth of influence on Capitol Hill.

It's a great system for those who can afford it. Most Americans can't.
And thankfully, most Americans don't share Will's vision of democracy.
That's why polls show that nine out of 10 Americans want significant
political reform to reduce the influence of big money in politics.
That's why voters in Arizona, Massachusetts, California, Colorado,
Arkansas and Maine -- every state where there was a reform proposal on
the ballot in the last two elections -- have enacted campaign finance
reform at the state level.

And that's why a majority in Congress supports reform. Last year, a
bipartisan majority in both the House and the Senate voted for a bill
to end soft money. The legislation died only when a minority of
Senators used a filibuster to block the bill from a final vote.

The symmetry must have been perfect for Will -- a minority of
legislators using obstructionist tactics to preserve a system that
best serves the interests of the tiny minority of wealthy citizens who
can afford to participate in it. Elitist democracy at work.

Will is dead wrong in defining the soft money issue as an effort to
ban speech about issues or limit participation in politics. Rather it
is an effort to protect democracy from the corrosive effect of big
money and to preserve public confidence in the institutions and ideals
of government. That's hard to do when a quarter of a billion dollars
of soft money is sloshing around the White House and the halls of
Congress, as it was in 1996.

But Will doesn't care about that. He's too busy getting the vapors
whenever he thinks about Common Cause working with a growing list of
reformers in Congress to make the political process more open and
democratic. That will happen -- sooner, rather than later. When it
does, someone better fetch smelling salts for George Will.

Ann McBride is president and Donald Simon is executive vice president
of Common Cause.